This website/forum needs a brief recent history or timeline section, so new readers can follow the story.
I'm finding it quite hard to navigate around here, so a relatively short descriptive history would get people up to date without confusing them. Ideally avoiding "opinion"!

I have noted some interest on other forums, they should be pointed to this background history to get an idea of the issues to date.

This website/forum needs a brief recent history or timeline section, so new readers can follow the story.
I'm finding it quite hard to navigate around here, so a relatively short descriptive history would get people up to date without confusing them. Ideally avoiding "opinion"!

I have noted some interest on other forums, they should be pointed to this background history to get an idea of the issues to date.

16 March 2017: CPA Australia board of Directors releases the first "Important Member Information" document to attempt to address concerns. The document contains some misleading information.

March 2017: An FOI request is put in to the Tax Practitioners Board (TPB) to find out how CPA Australia satisfied the TASA Regulation 1 - 207 (1) that the management of the organisation is required to be accountable to the members.

Late March 2017: This website is launched, registered anonymously in the Bahamas and hosted in Iceland a country with progressive freedom of speech laws.

April 2017: Brett has 100 signatures on a resolution to amend the constitution to reduce Director fees by half. A tactical decision is made in consultation with others to not put this up for a vote because the level of fees is just the tip of an iceberg. We did not want to risk creating the perception that the problem had been solved. Although this particular resolution has insanely massive support. We felt that the real issue here is that the constitution does not allow members much or any control.

April 2017: Brett requests a copy of the members register under section 173(?) of the Corporations Act. The hope is that it would contain email addresses and enable Brett to communicate his concerns to the entire membership. It costs about $2,500 Brett sends round the hat and has the money in 24 hours.

April 2017: About a week later Brett is give a copy of the members register. Unfortunately, it does not contain email addresses. However, another more serious breach is that the Member Status (ASA/CPA/FCPA/Honorary/Life) has been removed. This was only discovered in June 2017 through members of this website asking questions to Brett about the register. A failure to comply with section 173 can be punishable by 3 months jail.

April 2017: CPA Australia has their AGM in Singapore. Tyrone mentions that CPA Australia has done a lot of great things including "funding research"

April 2017: FOI requests are put in to some universities to try to find out how much research funding has been paid. At the time of writing we are still waiting for a response.

28 April 2017: Brett, supported by over 100 member signatures puts in a Corporations Act s202B request to disclose all Directors remuneration and other payments. Strangely this requires no other action than disclosing the money they are getting paid but seems to have triggered all the Directors resignations so far. More on that later.

May 2017: CPA Australia lodges the CPA Australia Advice financial statements with ASIC late (due in April). They were signed off on 14 February. Some people wonder if it was done that way because it's after the AGM.

May 2017: CPA Australia Advice financial statements are a disaster. $7.5m loss and $46k revenue. About 20 members as at 31 Dec. The thing looks like it's never going to be financially viable. CPA Australia announces it will reduce fees for tier 1 and tier 2 but not tier 3 (not sure date of this announcement). Perhaps they have enough members at tier 3. The business acumen of Alex Malley is seriously questioned.

Late May 2017: The FOI response is received from TPB in relation to how CPA Australia passed the criteria that the management is accountable to the members. A question on CPA Australia's application form asks something like: Is the management of the organisation required to be accountable to the members? CPA Australia answered by saying "Yes. See 2010 annual report and constitution". The date of the application was May 2009 so it should have referred to the 2009 annual report. The TPB did not ask for any elaboration was unable to provide any internal work papers on the assessment of this criteria. The TPB does not have any guideline or policy on how they assess this criteria and was only able to refer to a page on their website which only states what documents to attach to your application. A complaint has been made about the TPB to the Inspector General of Taxation (IGT).

30 May 2017: The board approves the release of the s202B response. Tyrone quits on this same day citing the need for renewal. Two subsidiary companies are left off the s202B response which means they failed to disclose remuneration of about 5 Directors. Also the remuneration for Awty and Hughes would need to be audited. Wording from some CPA Australia email responses suggests that payments other than Directors fees have not been disclosed. The report was audited by Deloitte but only are per the flawed basis of preparation that was drafted by CPA Australia.

May 2017: AFR questions how many actual CPA (voting) members CPA Australia actually has. Is it really the biggest accounting association in the country? This information was last reported in about 2008 and then it was about 45% ASAs.

Early June 2017: The s202B response is analysed and it shows that the Directors are paid above the CPA Australia Constitutional limits imposed by Article 45. The board claims that Article 45 does not apply to payments from a subsidiary. The CPA Australia financial statements state that the Directors are paid under Article 45 and the amount disclosed (in aggregate) did include the payments from CPA Australia Advice. Further the CPA Australia Advice financial statements stated that the Directors were paid under Article 45 of the CPA Australia constitution. CPA Australia now says that was wrong and that they are paid under the constitution of CPA Australia Advice. We have requested a copy of that constitution.

June 2017: The NSW Crown Solicitor expresses concerns that CPA Australia cannot be a regulator of accountants as it competes with them over the provision of financial advice. Seems to make eminent sense that you cannot regulate a competitor. Revealed that the concerns were raised with CPA Australia over 18 months ago, before most of the money was burned.

June 2017: Revealed by the AFR that CPA Australia has been offering free skilled migration visa assessments with a membership to overseas accountants. Further reinforcing the possible artificial inflation of member numbers.

June 2017: CPA Australia confirms in email that they are preparing another s202B disclosure for the 2 subsidiaries. What's the problem with having one disclosure that complies and audited as such?

June 2017: CPA Australia Advice financial statements show that equity was $2.8m and the loss about $7.5m. CPA Australia financial statements had incorrectly disclosed the equity of CPA Australia Advice as $1 and a loan of $5.5m covering up the extent of the loss of CPA Australia Advice. More questions for the auditor.

8 June 2017: Two more Directors resign. Putting a stake in the ground claiming to have been requesting a review of the governance/strategy of the organisation.

June 2017: A few days later another Director resigns.

June 2017: ASIC confirms they are investigating CPA Australia.

11 June 2017: CPA Australia board schedules emergency meeting for 13 June citing they need to respond to some unfair campaign from the AFR. Apparently all the above is the AFRs fault. The 13 June meeting is reported to have gone for 6 hours.

14 June 2017: Directors preannounce a significant announcement by the Chair and CEO for this Friday 16 June.

That is a good one about the recent Empire v Rebels (oops I mean CPAA v members) story.

And yes nakedadmin that's the sort of summary I think is needed. Do you mind if I edit a bit and repost it? I don't think I can get onto that until the weekend.
With the directors that resigned, can you identify which were independent, & which were of legal background?
When was Alex's sweaty interview when his addition of members was questioned?
When did Alex refer to personal threats, "wogs" etc?
Do we know what started the AFR reporting on CPAA (whenever that was)? If there are questions about 'why' then maybe AFR should be left out of the 'history' as much as possible (but we should credit them?)

ETA:
Who was it (Carlin?) that was working for a Uni under a condition that not more than one day per week could be on 'other' employment; yet was being remunerated at some % of the auditor-general's salary?

Last edited by ConcernedCPA on Wed Jun 14, 2017 9:38 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Oops - cross posted:
ETA:
Who was it (Carlin?) that was working for a Uni under a condition that not more than one day per week could be on 'other' employment; yet was being remunerated at some % of the auditor-general's salary?

When did Find a CPA get shut down; was there something else that was shut down too?

Yes Find A CPA was removed pretty much instantly after Brett's first email as it said he got the contact details from Find A CPA. Too bad he said that as Find A CPA would have had about 6,000 public practitioners on it.

Then for a couple weeks CPA Australia told people who called up that there was a technical fault with Find A CPA and they were working on a solution.

They also removed the pages on the Representative Council and in fact all the pages that explained the governance structure, e.g. Divisional Councils etc. Still offline. We currently cannot find out who actually Represents us at divisional or Representative Council level. This was a couple weeks before the 16 March important member information.

Tyrone Carlin was the first to resign. Supposedly worked about 10 days a year for the near $400,000.

The NSW Crown Solicitor thing is to do with PI insurance as the professions get a limit on how much they can be sued for. E.g. you only need insurance to $2m for a small practice. It's also an important recognition of us as professionals as CPA Australia previously stated but now it's supposedly just about insurance options.

15 June 2017: 3 more Directors resign. With only 5 Directors left the board does not have a quorum.

16 June 2017: The significant announcement turns out to be a review into "claims made" about CPA Australia. The terms of reference are not released (yet). But the media release has no reference to governance or strategy so it's unclear what is being reviewed. The so called fiercely independent review has 3 members, 2 are announced and they have both endorsed The Naked CEO book and spoke glowingly about Alex Malley as well as having other links.

16 June 2017: The Directors also announce that they have appointed a new Director, Tim Youngberry, so that they can form a quorum. Some expected the Directors would be forced to call an EGM. The question arises is this Director appointment constitutionally valid. http://cpamembers.org/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=350

23 June 2017: the Board announces the termination of Malley's contract, "to allow CPA Australia, CPA Australia staff and Alex to move forward". He receives a payout of $4.9M. Adam Awty is appointed interim CEO, but with the same remuneration as his COO role. The board also announces it will seek further expressions of interest for casual vacancies arising from the mid-term director resignations.

The constitution only allows emergency appointments up to the minimum of 6 not beyond that. They have a problem because they need an independent Director for the Nominations committee so cannot do Director recruitment without it.

OK. One for the lawyers ... but could Mr Malley have a claim of unfair dismissal as he was terminated by a constitutionally invalid Board?

And, I too am concerned about all this going forward. The Representative Council appoints the Board ... is that not the same Representative Council that appointed the Board as at 1 October 2016?

Oh, but wait, we don't know who they are as their names have disappeared from the website from on or about 1 March 2017!

Additionally, the current Board nomination process requires a set of skills etc. that the majority of CPAs could not possibly hope to have. This means we end up with a Board of the same ilk and mindset as the one that was in place on 1 October 2016 (although I don't know how Sharon Portelli, Richard Petty etc. met those lofty standards).

Indeed, where is Mr Youngberry's ASX experience?

Our biggest problem now is a constitution that makes this whole thing groundhog day!

We need an EGM to make constitutional changes to allow the organisation to change.

How many Malley wannabes are going to line up for a position where they get paid an outrageous amount of money? Oh, but wait, Mr Awty can do two jobs at once (Tyrone Carlin style) maybe we don't need a CEO????

If there is a CEO search who is going to oversee that? The current Board?

OK. One for the lawyers ... but could Mr Malley have a claim of unfair dismissal as he was terminated by a constitutionally invalid Board?

And, I too am concerned about all this going forward. The Representative Council appoints the Board ... is that not the same Representative Council that appointed the Board as at 1 October 2016?

Oh, but wait, we don't know who they are as their names have disappeared from the website from on or about 1 March 2017!

Additionally, the current Board nomination process requires a set of skills etc. that the majority of CPAs could not possibly hope to have. This means we end up with a Board of the same ilk and mindset as the one that was in place on 1 October 2016 (although I don't know how Sharon Portelli, Richard Petty etc. met those lofty standards).

Indeed, where is Mr Youngberry's ASX experience?

Our biggest problem now is a constitution that makes this whole thing groundhog day!

We need an EGM to make constitutional changes to allow the organisation to change.

How many Malley wannabes are going to line up for a position where they get paid an outrageous amount of money? Oh, but wait, Mr Awty can do two jobs at once (Tyrone Carlin style) maybe we don't need a CEO????

If there is a CEO search who is going to oversee that? The current Board?

Maybe there's another accounting lecturer from Macquarie Uni they could appoint as CEO???

The arrogance and stupidity of this "board " and the COO astound me , that they think they have the right to seek out a new CEO ...let alone appoint Awty to the role. When will they wake up !!
How they live with themselves beggars belief !!
Do they thing sacking Mallee suddenly makes them acceptable
Really people !!. Just stand down... get out ..so the mess can be cleaned up.
The divisional councils should have enough horsepower to fill the gaps.
The formal structure and how to do this still needs to come from the legal fighting fund Brett and others ... so follow up with all so we can get moving .
as i say Mallee is only the beginning... a lot more will need to be done.
The unmitigated bad management and governance still need to be accounted for ... and the residual council and executives are the core of a very bad apple.

"The arrogance and stupidity of this "board " and the COO astound me , that they think they have the right to seek out a new CEO ...let alone appoint Awty to the role. When will they wake up " .. Absolutely right .. they need some changes..